The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer. Concurrent with the expansion of networking technologies, an expansion in computing power has resulted in development of affordable computing devices capable of taking advantage of services made possible by modern networking technologies. This expansion in computing power has led to a reduction in the size of computing devices and given rise to a new generation of mobile devices that are capable of performing functionality that only a few years ago required processing power that could be provided only by the most advanced desktop computers. Consequently, mobile computing devices having a small form factor have become ubiquitous and are used to access network applications and services by consumers of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
The expansion of networks and concurrent evolution of mobile computing devices and other networked computing devices has resulted in a large base of devices having sufficient processing power, storage space, and network bandwidth to enable the transfer and playback of increasingly complex digital media files. Accordingly, Internet television, video sharing, other video streaming, and audio streaming are gaining widespread popularity.